Name: Saravanan Manickam
Position: Managing Director
Company: MOZARK Pte. Ltd
An international executive having worked as an Operations Chief with more than 20 years of radical innovation in the telecommunication industry, Saravanan or Sara as friends call him, has shown an established track record of guiding up to 200 staffs, streamlining business processes, managing and implementing numerous projects on schedule and showing outstanding business development skills and abilities. Saravanan has consistent success in driving sales, growth and profitability while also possessing a good ability to build high-performance teams in communication, networking, and capacity.
Can you give us a brief background about yourself, and when did you realise your passion for technology?
When I graduated from Nottingham Trent University, I chose this field of study because I’ve always been interested in repairing old appliances when I was growing up. My parents pushed me towards this path and that’s how I acquired this passion. Upon graduation, I got a job at Digi Telecom (Telenor Group) and it’s been 23 years. I’m in this industry from career advancement to managing a group of people, projects, countries and companies.
How would you describe MOZARK as a platform and what it generally focuses on?
MOZARK’s platform gives empowerment – to be able to see what most fails to see. We always need a technological platform that can automate the troubleshooting process, which can enable engineers to fix or solve issues immediately. The only possible way to do this is to have data on the subject. For us its MOZARK’s AQUAMARK and 5GMARK platforms, which analyses the application and network’s performance.
MOZARK is like a gift to telecommunication service providers. It gives our clients the authority to decide and enable them to meet customers’ expectations and offer enhanced services for their customers via direct infrastructure.
MOZARK’s main aim is to enhance the end user’s experience, what are the tools, features and solutions that guarantee the attainment for your goals?
We currently have few tools and platforms and also some new products development in the pipeline. One of the pioneer network QoE platform, MOZARK’s 5GMARK is the leader in measuring network and cloud quality of experience using crowdsourcing, device farming and also actively probing different types of data collection methodologies. So 5GMARK is widely used by operators and regulators such as the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI),Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) Dubai and France’s Arcep.
We have a new protocol platform under development which will be launched by the end of this year. MOZARK solutions and tools are designed to determine factors’ such as connection roadblocks that could affect the overall experience of any application.
How is MOZARK expanding in Malaysia and helping Malaysia achieve digital revolution?
For Malaysia we are looking into adding new products and looking at product line expansions, customisation to fit a certain enterprise/client because the current product portfolio we have can fit for one country but might not be in line with Malaysia’s digital revolution. We are looking at expanding or customising our products to fit Malaysia’s clientele and targeting building developers, property owners and investing in new customer acquisition. We also have plans to invest in smart building designs.
Most of the current solutions within buildings are becoming more sophisticated, and what we are trying to do is to provide a solution for all the operators to use a single infrastructure and make every building (if possible) to be smart enabled.
Tell us how MOZARK has helped corporations and SMEs when the world started practicing new norms such as working from home?
We have helped SMEs in measuring the connectivity of employees that are working from home. Employees might be working outside the city centre and the connectivity and the cellular experience might not be as good. Therefore, we have a platform that can measure the connectivity of each and every employee that is working from home, and this allows the SMEs to take corrective actions to ensure that every employee is productive. For example, Wi-Fi connectivity and cellular connectivity must be available in any premises they’re working from. If they don’t have proper connectivity, efficiency will be a problem and they might not be able to deliver whatever the employers’ demand.
MOZARK ensures that this will be delivered with a platform that is relevant to the business continuity and growth.
What are the key products/services of MOZARK that can be relevant to business continuity and growth during this current pandemic?
We are helping organisations to be digitally prepared and support them in pivoting their services to cater the current needs of the market. This will also deliver the right experience that one should know how to measure the performance, and to find the root issue and any possible bottlenecks.
We also provide Network Solutions for the telecom industry, such as an application layer that is able to provide data and insights. The data that we collect will help determine an accurate user experience and how to further improve the app’s infrastructure and also benchmark the usage of apps in different networks.
For example, if an entertainment service provider performed better with network operator 1 but not with network operator 2, why and how can we fix this? If there is a report with sufficient data available, operators can find out where needs fixing and what can be made to improve the quality of user experience. This is the kind of detailed analytics you get with MOZARK’s platforms.
How does MOZARK distinguish itself from the rest of its competition?
In MOZARK, we have the end-to-end platform and for example when you look at the telecom infrastructure, there are many components from radio access network, transmission, core and devices, there can be issues with each of these components. While some services can measure only selected components, we conduct data collections and analytics from end-to-end, all the way from the first step to the last mile. With this, we can really see the analytics on the dashboard and where exactly the problem lies, allowing us to fix the correct problems at the right juncture.
MOZARK recently acquired Consistel, would you share with us what this acquisition will bring to the company?
I grew up with Consistel for almost 20 years. Consistel has a lot of experience in the telecom industry, and that goes for MOZARK as well. The Board was confident that MOZARK will grow the business and we can continue to serve our clients in the telecom market. Because Consistel was focused on delivering building connectivity, while MOZARK is focused on collecting data from indoor environments, analysing the data and providing solutions. Consistel Board felt that this is a good merger due to our 20 year experience in one vertical and MOZARK’s experience in another three verticals.
Anybody serving the client end-to-end, must have these four verticals to work together. This acquisition is actually providing our existing clients a wider variety of products. We find that this merger and acquisition will bring us to the right channel.
Who are among the prominent clients does MOZARK have and what kind of services do they come to you for?
In Malaysia, for 20 years we had the Consistel office, after the acquisition by MOZARK, we’re ramping up operations and our first client was Timedotcom, who awarded In-Building design and deployment projects to improve their building’s connectivity. Edotco wanted a solution for their 5G demonstration projects and we have done a solution together with our equipment partner from USA.
Besides that, we have provided the QoE analytics platform for 5G demonstration project in Langkawi airport, and in Singapore; we have three main clients – Singtel, StarHub and Marina Bay Sands, who is one of our biggest clients as they have their own private LTE network.
In the Philippines we have Globe Telecom and Huawei in a similar role, where we provide solution to improve indoor connectivity and indoor performance experience. We also have clients in India, such as SonyLIV and some clients in France including Arcep, Carrefour and Huawei as well.
Any words you would like to say to your potential partners and clients as a long time professional in the field or as one of MOZARK’s leaders?
Malaysia is among the top in South East Asia in terms of mobile connectivity. In this field, Malaysia should evolve, and leverage on new technologies to deliver superior connectivity to its citizens. I’m sure Malaysia’s regulators are looking into the 5G development too.
Rural connectivity must be enhanced since balik kampung is a common activity in Malaysia. Secondly, post pandemic working from home is new norm hence the rural connectivity must be improved in order for people to operate as efficient possible form these locations. As such, mobile operators and SMEs need partners like MOZARK to test and perform market study to understand the state of connectivity in rural area. This strengthens mobile operator’s decision making process and determines the solutions required to close the connectivity gap in rural area. With the aid of MOZARK platform, mobile operators will be able to recognise the true and actual segment of network enhancement required to improve user experience.
